I have been reasonably satisfied with the services provided by the Bank of Montreal for many years. I have a Value Plan Deposit Account for my small business, and I try to keep the minimum balance of $5 000.00 CAD in order to avoid banking service fees.
On 2002-07-23, the balance of my Value Plan Deposit Account was $8 138.53 CAD. First, I asked the teller at Bells Corners's branch to deposit $100.00 CAD to increase the balance to $8 238.53 CAD, which is clearly shown on the "Transaction Record". Once this transaction was complete, I asked the teller to bank-wire $2 000 USD ($3 217.80 CAD) to a U.S. company. The bank-wire decreased the balance to $5 020.73 CAD.
When I received the Business Banking statement as of 2002-07-31, I was surprised to find that the "US $ Wire Payment" was shown before the "Deposit", making the balance to temporarily decrease to $4 920.73 CAD, below the $5 000.00 CAD required to avoid banking service fees. As a result, there was a debit of $1.00 CAD from my account for "Branch Transaction Fee".
Since I had made 2 similar transactions a few months before, I checked the Business Banking statement as of 2001-12-31, and found that a "Branch Transaction Fee" of $1.00 CAD was also debited from my account at that time.
In each case, I made a conscious effort to avoid the "Branch Transaction Fee" by making a deposit to my account prior to doing a bank-wire. On each occasion, I double-checked the sequence with the branch teller who confirmed that the deposit was made prior to the bank-wire. Yet, the 2 Business Banking statements show that I did a bank-wire before making a deposit. This is factually incorrect, and the error cost me unnecessary banking service fees (a total of $2.00 CAD).
It seems that the bank computer is programmed to record any debits prior to any credits for a given day, regardless of the actual sequence. I would like to request that Bank of Montreal's accounting system be modified to respect the sequence of events.
